Alien (1979)

There was a time when Alien was an unquestionable five stars for me. No hesitation, no asterisks, no "but". And coming back to it in 2025, I spent the first half genuinely wondering if I'd been wrong to budge from that position at all. The atmosphere is still suffocating. The tension still builds like pressure behind your eyes. The moment that chest bursts, you still feel it in your stomach even if you know it's coming. This film has weight to it, a physical, oppressive, lived-in heaviness that most horror films spend their entire runtime chasing and never catch.

So why the half star off? I'll be honest with you: some of the effects don't quite hold up the way they once did. The seams are showing in places I didn't notice before, or maybe didn't want to notice. A couple of shots pull you just slightly out of the dream, and when the dream is this carefully constructed, even a small crack lets the cold air in. It's the only reason this isn't sitting at five stars, and it feels almost churlish to mention it. But here we are.

What Ridley Scott does with the Nostromo is frankly extraordinary. The ship doesn't feel like a set. It feels like a place people have actually lived and worked in for months, grimy and functional and indifferent to human comfort. The corridors are tight. The shadows do a lot of heavy lifting. There's no wasted space in the production design, and there's no wasted scene in the script either. The pacing is slow-burn to the point where some viewers find it frustrating, and I get that, but I think that patience is precisely where the film earns its terror. You're never quite sure what's lurking in the frame, and Scott knows exactly how long to make you wait before he shows you.

H.R. Giger's creature design remains one of the most unsettling things ever committed to film. There's something deeply wrong about the alien, something that goes beyond "scary monster" into something more primal and psychological. It shouldn't look the way it looks. And yet it does. It's a design that's been imitated endlessly in the decades since, which is part of why returning to the original still feels so striking. This is where that came from. All of it.

And then there's Sigourney Weaver. Ripley is one of cinema's great characters, full stop, and Weaver earns every inch of that reputation here. She's not performing heroism. She's performing survival, which is a much harder thing to make compelling. You believe in her completely. The rest of the ensemble are excellent too, a crew that feels genuinely human rather than genre-functional, which is part of why losing them one by one lands as hard as it does.

I've watched what this franchise has become. I've reviewed Alien: Covenant and Prometheus (2012), both of which chase this film's shadows with mixed results. Neither of them manages to replicate whatever Ridley Scott had in 1979, and I'm not sure they ever could, because what he had wasn't a formula. It was instinct, and confidence, and a set that genuinely terrified his cast.

Even with my small, nagging reservations about the effects, this is still one of the finest sci-fi horror films ever made. It redefined what the genre could be, launched a franchise that's still running, and on a dark night with the volume up, it still puts most modern horror to shame. If you've somehow never seen it, clear an evening. Turn the lights off. And maybe don't watch it alone.

Four and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 1979  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Ridley Scott: Black Hawk Down (2001) · Gladiator (2000) · Prometheus (2012) · Alien: Covenant (2017)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)